11 comments

Just be sure to get everyone in the office on board before you make the leap.

The worst thing that can happen – and has happened in two of my offices now – is to introduce a new electronic system, but out of a desire to ease into the new technology you continue to use the old paper system as well.

So now, instead of increasing efficiency and reducing waste, you’ve done the opposite – and everyone quickly turns against the new technology because, hey, why are we even doing this? Weren’t things better when we were just using the old system?

And Luddite-ism – always lurking in every office – begins to grow among your coworkers.

Dropbox is a wonderful program – we’ve been using it for almost a year now, and are entirely satisfied with it. It allows you to collaborate with other attorneys even from other firms with the simple step of sharing a folder with them. Additionally, a program called Airdropper (https://airdropper.com/) can be used as an add-in to allow your clients to put files into Dropbox without giving them access to your system.

We love dropbox and the scansnap too. Question for you…do each of your attorneys/staff have their own dropbox account and then you just share the folder? Or do you share the one dropbox account amongst your firm? We have done the former, as I’m just guessing that the latter would be against the terms of use, but I never have actually looked into it.

@preston
With the iPad at the court room and an easy to access digital archive you will have all the document available. With the ZyLab search solution in your digital office you even can use fuzzy questions to find the documents you require for your case.

Within a digital court a cloud based printing solution should be made available. This means that you could send documents from your iPad to a multifunctional in the court building as you need it. With accounting enabled the court can even invoice your office on printed pages, so no public money is spend.

With the scanning option you could digitize documents and add to your digital case folder.

I love the idea of going paperless but I haven’t figured out how to go to court hearings without a paper document. For example, here in North Carolina we don’t have efiling yet. Most courtrooms do not have computers and monitors that you can hook up to your own computer to share documents like you might find in federal court.

1. How do you handle going to court for a motion hearing? I typically have my brief and case law printed and yes, three additional copies for other attorneys and the judge.

2. It is almost weekly that a judge will say I don’t have that document in the court file can you hand one up. What do you do if you only have an ipad with you?

I believe going paperless can be applied even in court houses and law offices. These lawyers can invest in document shredding services to get rid of old files. But of course, they must scan and save these data on a secure hard drive.

I am down with the paperless idea and our law firm is currently working on going paperless. What products do other paperless offices recommend for the security of their backed up and cloud documents? Also, does anybody use encryption?

We used mozy.com for a couple years, but it was slow and the time to retrieve it was not hours, but days. We switched to Dropbox as our online backup solution. We also do a weekly backup to a 1tb harddrive we leave onsite. Finally, we have goclio.com that stores documents associated with a matter on their site.

I know Dropbox has security issues, but I don’t accept that it is any riskier than using email or possibly having a hacker get into my server.